Author catalogue, Humanities

AUTHOR CATALOGUE

As a student of library science, you can now appreciate that librarianship is basically concerned with creating systematic records of bibliographical items. Each record that a librarian creates is expected to provide access to a source of information like a book or an article from a journal or some other document. We may refer to it as a 'bibliographic record'. It is possible to collect these bibliographic records into different sets according to the function each set performs. One such set of records, for example, may be used as a finding list, otherwise known as a library catalogue. A library catalogue consists of records or entries, each of which cites a book. There are several ways of citing a book. In other words, there are several kinds of entries for a book, as you must have learnt while studying Unit 5 of the present course. One way of recording a book in a catalogue is to enter it under the name of its author. Additionally, a book may be entered under its title as also under the subject of its content. A cataloguer thus presumes that a library user has three ways of approaching the collection - author, title, or subject. Here again, the presumption is that the user knows the 'author's name or the title. When neither is known, subject approach is helpful. Occasionally a user may want to see if there is any book/ new book published under a series.